Graphic as a Star

When Josephine Foster released A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing in 2006, she provocatively recorded the lieder of composers like Schumman, Brahms, and Schubert in a unique framework. She sang them in German and played acoustic guitar, piano, and harmonica with improvising electric guitarist Brian Goodman accompanying her for a contemporary feel. Though her music exists in a unique space, she echoes such risk-taking classic folk performers such as Shirley Collins. On Graphic as a Star -- her debut album for Fire Records -- she has written music to the poems of Emily Dickinson, and the fit is seamless. She conceived the 26-song cycle while living in a remote region of Spain and had brought very few books with her. Dickinson's poems provided comfort. In her liner notes she claims these songs came together in a matter of weeks. Musically, this is more sparse than anything she's ever recorded -- accompanying herself only on an acoustic guitar, sometimes with a primitive-sounding harmonica added. She also she sings a cappella ("Wild Nights - Wild Nights!") or with only the sounds of chirping birds in the background ("What Shall I Do - It Whimpers So -"). While all of Foster's work is provocative, this proves the warmest, loveliest, and most beautifully articulated recording in her catalog. These poems (which were also written in solitude; Dickinson was a self-imposed shut-in) easily lend themselves to Foster's song forms, due to the poet's keen sense of time, rhythm, and space. Dickinson's writing is often wonderfully elliptical in image and meaning; Foster underscores this here: there are no choruses. These songs are small but evoke the vast emptiness surrounding them. They don't feel melancholy, even when they are, such as in "My Life Had Stood - A Loaded Gun." Instead they are evocative of an America at once imagined and longed for -- and this sense of homesickness is evident in the reedy beauty of Foster's voice -- which is more controlled and tempered than ever before; she seems to have found the exact pitch and timbre she's sought since the beginning. While the entire cycle is gorgeous and the tunes nearly inseparable from one another, a couple of tracks lend themselves to singling out: the lilting early American folk melody in "Tho' My Destiny Be Fustian -" and the languid, bluesy stroll of "I Could Bring You Jewels - Had I a Mind To -." Graphic as a Star is exquisite. ~ Thom Jurek